Letter: Gun registration is gun confiscation

Bill S. 443, to stop illegal trafficking in firearms, imposes harsh sentences on gun owners, up to 15 years in prison for buying a firearm to sell or give to a "prohibited person." Already 150,000 of our nation's veterans are considered "prohibited" just because they acknowledged stress after returning home from active duty.

The definition of "prohibited" could change any time, too.

To date, 83,000 veterans have been stripped of these gun rights. That leads us to mental health screening, which is just an excuse for creating a national no-gun database. Have you ever served in the military or experienced a traumatic situation like a death in the family? If your answer is yes, or even complain of stress to the wrong person, you could lose your Second Amendment rights.

A total of 38 states have some sort of mental health database, and one former surgeon general estimated that 46.4 percent of Americans will suffer from mental health issues at some point in their lives. That means nearly half of Americans will lose their Second Amendment rights.

It was 15 years ago Congress cut funding for Centers for Disease Control research because top officials, like Dr. Patrick O'Carroll, stated that "we're going to systematically build a case that states owning firearms causes deaths. We're doing the most we can do, given political realities."

Expanding background checks has nothing to do with the recent tragedy in Newtown, Conn., but it will give the federal government a record of every firearm transferred through the Federal Firearm License. To call background checks anything but gun registration is a lie. Anyone who knows history can attest that gun registration leads to gun confiscation.

From 1900 to 1999 there were 262 million murders by governments. Disarmed, we become just as vulnerable as the Germans, Chinese, Russians, Cambodians, Rwandans, Congolese or Syrians to mass slaughter.